More than sixty Weimar firms used labour from Buchenwald between 1942 and 1945, and for the duration of its existence more than forty Weimar firms profited from serving and supplying the camp. Nazi Party chapter leader, town councillor and SS officer Thilo Bornschein provided almost all the foodstuffs to the camp, and became rich enough to afford Bauhaus-Muche’s Haus am Horn. His turnover in 1941 alone was half a million Reichsmarks. Hans Kroger, who had taken over the Aryanised Herman Tietz mixed goods department store for the equivalent of less than a penny, operated a near monopoly on textiles, while local butcher Karl Daniel provided sausages (known as rubber sausages due to their appalling quality) and brewery Deinhardt shipped beer to the SS. The historic apothecary in the quaint main town square supplied SS physicians with the drugs they frequently used to kill people.
In total, many local people either serviced the camp, or met its inmates on the road, on a building site, or even in town itself working on a forced labour project. A snapshot photo, taken in 1939, shows a gang of inmates marching down a street in the neighbouring village of Gaberndorf, while a man and a small boy lean against an open door watching curiously, but impassively.
For some local residents, interaction with the camp was even more sinister. Take, for example, the doctors, nurses and administrators in the Weimar municipal hospital that treated both SS officers from the camp, and some camp inmates, up until the summer of 1938. It was in these hospitals that some camp prisoners were brought to be forcibly sterilised. Those physicians were certainly aware of the terrible circumstances in Buchenwald. So, too, was the Weimar office of public health and its employees, who were responsible for setting rations for camp food and for overseeing the response to the typhus epidemic of 1939 that arose due to appalling hygiene conditions.
Until the outbreak of war there were three main categories of prisoners. Criminals had a green triangle on their uniforms, while political prisoners, mostly communists, had a red triangle. The uniforms of Jewish prisoners bore a yellow star. Buchenwald also had several hundred Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had a purple star on their uniforms, and forty-three gay men who had a pink star. The number of inmates rose significantly during the war, but looking at a timeline of arrivals in the late 1930s the following main points stand out: by spring 1938 the camp held 2,500 men. In June that number was bolstered by 500, when the first Jewish prisoners arrived. Then, in September 1939, a further 2,300 political prisoners arrived from Dachau. But by far the greatest influx of prisoners occurred in November and December 1938, after Kristallnacht. More than 10,000 Jewish prisoners were rounded up and committed to Buchenwald, but most were released again after pledging to leave Germany.
During these years Buchenwald was officially designated a Category II camp, for prisoners who could be ‘reformed’, but only with difficulty. (By comparison Mauthausen was the only Category I camp, for prisoners deemed impossible to reform, Dachau was a Category III camp where it was supposedly easier to gain release.)
Yet for those imprisoned within its 3 km of electrified fencing, this must have seemed the most arbitrary of designations. Life for inmates at Buchenwald was designed to be as intolerable and inhumane as possible. Later in the history of the camp, the SS would recognise the economic benefits it could reap from such a large slave-labour population – but in the beginning the emphasis was less on ‘efficiency’ and far more on punishment and probable death, usually at the hands of sadists and psychopaths. Before the outbreak of war, Buchenwald had the highest mortality rate of any concentration camp.
The regime of Buchenwald’s first commander, Karl-Otto Koch, and his equally detested wife, Ilse, was characterised by capricious cruelty, corruption and graft. Prisoner William Gellinick recalls hearing Ilse Koch saying to her husband: ‘My little pigeon, I think it is time for that old man to grovel a bit,’ before the prisoner was made to roll up and down a hill, sustaining injuries which led to his death. The Kochs had two children during their time in charge of Buchenwald, and Karl Koch was photographed with his small son petting a deer in the grounds of the Buchenwald Zoo, which was located just outside the perimeter fence, overlooking the crematorium. The caption in the Koch family photo album read: ‘At the zoo with Daddy’.
Visibly resisting any rules led to certain death, and the SS specialised in introducing conflicting ones that made it impossible to survive. For example, a guard would throw an inmate’s cap in the direction of the barbed wire fence and order him to fetch it. If he did so he was shot for trying to escape, if he refused he was shot for disobeying orders.
Those who survived the long hours of roll call, standing outside every morning and evening in snow and rain, could then be crushed to death by falling boulders in the quarry or hit by runaway loading cars. In one such ‘occupational accident’, Jewish inmate Horst Loewenberg was chased to his death by a lorry driven by the SS.
Prisoners were routinely tortured. They were hung from trees in the woods and whipped, or locked up in the infamous arrest cells run by notorious sadist Martin Sommer – who liked to personally strangle his victims and kept an electrified skull on his desk. Those who did not die from overwork or torture could starve on the tiny rations of food (prisoners were allowed no more than 550 grams of bread with a small piece of sausage, some thin soup and ¼ litre of drinking water per day, but were often served half of this portion), or be killed in one of the camp’s notorious medical experiments where they were injected with typhus, yellow fever or diphtheria, or horrifically burned with phosphorus. Many died due to lack of sanitation (the camp had toilets, but no running water for years); disease was rife and prisoners were left to fester without treatment.
It was this hellish combination of punishment, torture, non-existent sanitation and complete lack of regard for human life that brought Topf and Sons into contact with Buchenwald – and into bed with the SS.
Between 1937 and 1940, bodies from Buchenwald were transported down the hill for cremation in the main Weimar crematorium, and, from the first, the SS had subverted and broken German law. The law stated that family members had to consent to cremation in writing beforehand, but this agreement was set aside in the case of the inmates of Buchenwald as early as 27 September 1937, when Weimar’s Chief Burgomaster wrote:
I hereby consent to the petition by the concentration camp commander to carry out the cremation of the corpses for a lump sum fee of 20 RM. I request that the camp command headquarters be informed of this and be instructed that the certificate required according to Article 3, Item 2 of the Reich law governing cremation be submitted at the time of the transport of the corpse. For the sake of simplicity I am enclosing a number of forms…31
The form, which was supposed to be submitted by a family member, could now be filled in and signed by the SS in Buchenwald.
Yet, even setting aside the inconvenience of cremation law, the SS could not completely overcome some of the logistical problems of disguising the murder of mass numbers of people, and the disposal of their bodies.
The transportation of the bodies often drew unwanted attention to camp conditions, when, on at least one occasion, the crude boxes housing the bodies fell off the lorry that was transporting them, splitting and causing bodies to roll into the road. ‘Corpses lay on the pavement for everybody to see; the bodies looked “mutilated”’, remembered one undertaker’s helper.32
In addition, the scale of the task was noticeable, taxing town facilities to the limit. In the three years between 1937 and 1940, the bodies of 2,000 inmates were cremated in local crematoria and, as conditions in the camp worsened, the death toll continued to rise.
Buchenwald prisoner Erich Haase wrote:
In the Polish camp, in the winter of 1939/40 alone, 40–70 comrades were dying every day. Either from dysentery or from camp fever, or from being beaten to death or being murdered in other terrible ways, with the result that so many bodies were being taken to surrounding towns for cremation that the crematoria in Weimar, Jena and Leipzig simply couldn’t cope with them a
ll.33
In comparison, a small town at the time would average only twenty-five cremations per month, with the number for large towns reaching only 100.
The rising death toll did not surprise the SS – they had caused it. In October 1939, filthy hygiene led to an outbreak of dysentery in the ‘special Polish camp’ in Buchenwald that held 3,000 people including Jews and non-Jewish Poles, and Jews from Vienna. The SS did nothing to eradicate or prevent prisoners from contracting the disease, and instead left 800 people to starve or die from infection.
Prisoner Walter Poller was a medical recorder in the quarantined camp; he made the following report:
The living with the dead, the healthy with the dying, old men with children, the terrified and the fatalistic. Unbelievable blight, indescribable filth, people rotting while they still lived, mad people writhing in spasms, people in comas … an apocalypse such as no brain could ever invent and no pen describe.34
Rather than treat the sick, or improve conditions, the SS planned to deal with the situation by moving cremation to inside the camp itself. As Kurt Prüfer’s May 1939 design for a mobile incineration oven demonstrated, they had already approached Topf and Sons about this task. Now their relationship could begin in earnest.
The SS had restructured their organisation and control of concentration camps under the leadership of SS Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl, who was now in charge of two newly created offices in Berlin: the Office for Administration and Economy and the Office for Households and Buildings. One of Oswald Pohl’s first tasks was to organise the disposal of the bodies in concentration camps, and in October 1939 the name Pohl appears for the first time in Topf and Sons’ records.
Kurt Prüfer maintained meticulous handwritten records of all his sales during the period that he was paid commission, and these records are available to look at in the Thuringia State Archives in Weimar.
In October 1939 Prüfer records an unusually large amount of money, 15,948 RM against order number 39 D 1018/19 for customer ‘G. Pohl Trade Group Berlin’. The order does not state the product, but it was later revealed to be for three single-muffle ovens, one of which was tested and set up in Buchenwald next to the special camp.
G. Pohl, Trade Group Berlin shows up again in Prüfer’s records in March 1940, this time against a sales figure of 1,466 RM. Topf and Sons’ historian Annegret Schüle, surmises that the ‘G. Pohl’ referred to in these early orders is Gruppenführer Pohl, using the cover of the Construction Industry Trade Group (a national body of which Topf and Sons were members) to disguise the fact that he was placing the orders on behalf of the SS. Both orders also state ‘Wehrmacht Contract’, which was standard practice when referring to SS orders for rationed building materials for the camps. In addition, Soviet administration documents produced in 1947 list the production of a mobile single-muffle oven in 1939, and a mobile double-muffle oven in 1940. Any early attempts to conceal the relationship were soon abandoned, however. From March 1940, Kurt Prüfer’s records list the customer as SS Reich Office for Household and Buildings.
After securing his first commission from the SS for the mobile single-muffle oven, Prüfer got to work designing a mobile double-muffle oven which was sold to Dachau in November 1939. Prüfer’s technical innovation with the double-muffle oven allowed two incineration chambers to be fuelled by one source of fire, through gaps left in the dividing walls between the chambers. This speeded up the incineration process, but the gaps and the single source of fire meant that the ashes and remains of the deceased intermingled – something that was illegal under German law where the ashes of each body were supposed to remain strictly separate.
Topf and Sons had proven themselves to be reliable suppliers to the SS and, having completed two orders for mobile ovens, began work on building permanent crematoria inside the camps. Oswald Pohl issued the order to build a crematorium at Buchenwald on the 11 December 1939 and, on 21 December 1939, Topf and Sons responded with a quote for a static, double-muffle oven with oil burner for 9,728 RM. This oven would be completely walled in and had to be installed in-situ. With better insulation and greater capacity, it would be able to burn more bodies more quickly. (With no slider or ornamental door, it would also badly burn the hands of those forced to open and close the ovens.)
On 21 January 1940, the Buchenwald concentration camp management unit submitted an ‘application for building materials for the new build of an emergency crematorium in the KLB prison camp’ to the SS main Office for Household and Buildings, and work commenced in the freezing winter of 1939–1940.
With temperatures dropping as low as -39°C all other work at the camp stopped, but the SS insisted that the building of the crematorium had to continue. ‘All the SS Blockführer and foremen gathered together on the site,’ an Austrian prisoner called Franz Bera recalled. ‘The crematorium was built at speed, as the field crematoria that had been set up were no longer able to burn the bodies.’35
By summer that year the crematorium was up and running, and a crematorium manager had been employed at Buchenwald. Prisoner Eric Hasse remembers that the SS were so concerned with disposing of their ever-increasing number of victims that they would try to double the number of cremations per day by pushing in two or three bodies at the same time. ‘It meant that larger bits of bone were left over; the SS people would wait until night and then throw them into the sewers. The prisoners in the camp only realised this was happening when the drains from the sewage treatment facilities became blocked.’36
Contrary to Topf and Sons’ frequent boasts about ensuring ‘smoke-free’ cremation, smoke and flames often poured from concentration camp chimneys, and the smell of burned flesh lingered in the air. Curiously, it is a point that descendant Hartmut Topf feels most defensive about. Standing in Buchenwald next to the crematorium he says: ‘If they say they saw that, I am not going to say they are lying. But that was one of the things that Topf and Sons was most proud of – being smoke free.’37
Of course, Topf and Sons’ claim applied only to their standard practice in town crematorium – and as we know, in concentration camps, no rules applied. Smoke-free cremation is only achieved if bodies are burned individually over a long enough period of time. Burning multiple bodies too quickly meant that cremations in the camps were incomplete, and it was the unburned human remains and carbon that prisoners could see and smell.
In a statement given to Soviet prosecutors in 1948 in Moscow, Kurt Prüfer outlines how the business relationship between the SS and Topf and Sons began:
The Topf company started building ovens for crematoria in 1940 [Note: It was actually 1939]. The head of the SS construction management unit of the Buchenwald concentration camp, whose name was Grosch, approached the company about this. I conducted negotiations with Grosch on behalf of the company director, Ludwig Topf, for the construction of two ovens for the crematorium of the Buchenwald camp. Shortly afterwards a representative from the SS main office, whose name I’ve forgotten, visited the Topf company in Erfurt for negotiations with Ludwig Topf in connection with the construction of cremation ovens in other concentration camps. I took part in these negotiations by invitation of the company director, along with Mersch, who was head of the planning department. At the meeting an agreement was reached with the Reich Main Office of the SS that the Topf company would build ovens for crematoria in concentration camps, although the specific contracts in each case would be concluded with the SS construction management unit at the respective concentration camp, and these would also be the commissioning customer. And this is what later happened. [The ‘Grosch’ Prüfer refers to was SS-Obersturmführer Gerhard Grosch, a Weimar native and a construction manager at Buchenwald.]38
Kurt Prüfer, as well as other engineers, fitters and the company management, must have been made aware of the conditions at Buchenwald after their very first visit to the camp when they were trialling the mobile single-muffle oven. Yet instead of being put off by the inhumanity, they saw the camp as an opportunity to attract more business
from a previously untapped market. They dedicated themselves to cementing their relationship with the SS, in spite of the horrors they must have witnessed. For Prüfer, it was an opportunity to make more money and improve his status in the company – both of which were at a standstill. The motivation of Ludwig Topf, however, appears less straightforward.
Annegret Schüle speculates that a relationship with the SS appealed to Ludwig’s ‘lust for adventure and self-centredness’. Or, as his secretary, Johanne Bushleb, later recalled, his desire to be seen as a ‘man of action’ with a fiery temper and a need to get his own way.39 Certainly Ludwig was operating in an area that he had already claimed as his own – cremation – and he was finally able to step out of his brother’s shadow.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, Ludwig explained to the works council how Topf and Sons had formed a relationship with the SS. Setting the scene, Ludwig explains that Kurt Prüfer was in the process of repairing the Weimar civil crematorium when the dysentery epidemic broke out at Buchenwald, and the death toll began to rise.
‘The epidemic naturally posed a problem for the transportation of the dead bodies, and it was decided to set up a crematorium oven right there on the site, which was totally the right thing to do from a hygiene perspective.’ Ludwig then wrongly describes the administrative origin of the contract, before concluding ‘and then other orders for ovens for Buchenwald and also for the other camps followed’.40
Schüle notes that in this meeting, Ludwig was ‘at pains to conceal the true nature of the concentration camps,’41 but he needn’t have bothered, as the works council was already fully aware of camp conditions. The minutes from the meeting note: ‘This background was quite clear to the men of the works council and they were of the opinion that it was not something they needed to be concerned about.’42
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